Implicit transfer of motor strategies in mental rotation

Abstract

Recent research indicates that motor areas are activated in some types of mental rotation. Many of these studies have required participants to perform egocentric transformations of body parts or whole bodies; however, motor activation also has been found with nonbody objects when participants explicitly relate the objects to their hands. The current study used positron emission tomography (PET) to examine whether such egocentric motor strategies can be transferred implicitly from one type of mental rotation to another. Two groups of participants were tested. In the Hand–Object group, participants performed imaginal rotations of pictures of hands; following this, they then made similar judgments of pictures of Shepard–Metzler objects. The Object–Object group performed the rotation task for two sets of Shepard–Metzler objects only. When the second condition in each group (which always required rotating Shepard–Metzler objects) was compared, motor areas (Area 6 and M1) were found to be activated only in the Hand–Object group. These findings suggest that motor strategies can be covertly transferred to imaginal transformations of nonbody objects.